2 dead, 17 wounded in overnight shootings across city (Guess Where)

Nineteen people were shot, two fatally, across the city Friday night and Saturday morning.

The weekend's violence started about 6:20 p.m. Friday with an attack in which two people were shot in the 500 block of South Kilpatrick Avenue in the West Garfield Park neighborhood. One person, whose age was unavailable, was taken to John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County and the other, 22, was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. City police weren't able to say what happened. The dead man, Richard Johnson, lived in the 1600 block of Plum Street in Aurora, a spokeswoman for the Cook County medical examiner's office said. He was pronounced dead just after 7 p.m. at Mount Sinai Hospital.

The other homicide happened about 12:15 a.m. in the 11500 block of South Wentworth Avenue in the West Pullman neighborhood. Two men were shot and one didn't survive. Police said an 18-year-old was found dead with a gun in his hand and a second man, 25, was dropped off at Roseland Hospital with gunshot wounds to the leg. The 18-year-old affiliates with a gang but it's not clear if he fired his gun before he was struck, police said. The Cook County medical examiner's office identified the dead man as Derrick L. Baker, of the 11600 block of South Yale Avenue.

Two men and a 17-year-old boy were wounded about 3:30 a.m. in an attack in the 6900 block of South Bishop Street in the West Englewood neighborhood, Chicago Police Department News Affairs Officer Ron Gaines said. The teen is in good condition at Advocate Christ Medical Center with a wounded leg. A 20-year-old man was shot in the arm and shoulder and is at Stroger Hospital and a 23-year-old man shot in the neck, arm and chest is in critical condition at Advocate Christ Medical Center.

4. I believe you're wrong about that

The murder rate in Chicago is twice that of Los Angeles and four times higher than New York’s rate, and in recent weeks the Windy City has had some high-profile incidents. Warmer weather has brought a surge in gun violence, with more expected at the upcoming Puerto Rican Festival and the large crowds it draws -- -- Source Huffington Post

This year 228 Chicago residents have been killed, while the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan during the same period is 144 -- Source Huffington Post

Since 2001 more than 5,000 people have been killed by gunfire in Chicago, and during that same period 2,000 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan -- Source Chicago’s WBEZ 91.5

5. What's going on recently in Chicago proves

that their problem is not guns. There are other comparable sized cities that have guns and not as much gun crime. They have a gang problem that needs to be taken care of. Instead of taking care of the gang problem, Rahm Emmanuel pushes for a law that makes it illegal for teens to go to tanning booths.

7. They have illegal guns...can you just imagine if they had legal guns that

8. the murder rate would remain the same

gang members don't bother getting FOIDs (the Illinois Firearms Owners ID, which is required to buy or possess a gun or ammunition in the state). Gang warfare is the biggest problem when it comes to people killing each other.
The most probable changes would be a few more (I don't picture Chicago residents making a run on gun stores to buy pistols) suicide by gun, but the suicide rate would remain the same.

You are attempting to suggest by quoting numbers that Chicago is more dangerous to its citizens than Afghanistan is to U.S. soldiers. But there are more than twenty-five times as many people in Chicago than there are U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, so actually a soldier in Afghanistan runs roughly twelve to fifteen times the chance of being killed by hostile action. The matter is further muddied by the fact that, so far as wars go, U.S. forces in Afghanistan suffer unusually few fatalities. Casualty rates in Viet Nam, on a per capita engaged calculation, ran at rates five to six times higher than rates in Afghanistan, and casualty rates in U.S. combat units in WWII ran even higher than that. To go and shoot the whole works, the number of U.S. soldiers who die in a month in Afghanistan is generally less than the number of people who die of all causes in Chicago on a typical day ( heart failure of one sort or another accounting for nearly half of them, and dwarfing the number dead as a result of crime ). Thus, given the relative size of the populations, a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan is not much more likely to die of hostile action than a typical urban civilian is to die of natural causes, which establishes the Afghan War as one of the safest in history for a combatant force on one side, and demonstrates it is certainly not to be taken as some kind of metric for extreme danger, which it is then pretended a city in the U.S. exceeds.

13. Except There Is Not, Sir: That Is Wretched Hyperbole

Chicago is a city with about two and three-quarter millions of inhabitants, and while it does have about the highest murder rate among large cities, that rate is well below peaks it reached some years ago. The attempt to present Chicago as a place under siege by violence is laughable; to attempt to present the cumulative total of incidents among two and three-quarter millions of persons in an area of about two hundred twenty-five square miles over a period of seventy-two hours, with a point of massacre occurring in a space of minutes in an enclosed area of no great size, during which a great portion of the persons present were struck, is simply to display gross contempt for the intelligence of persons you address.

Even were one to treat your nonesense seriously and do the arithmetic, you would have a number of murders in excess of the yearly total, and with no allowance whatever for incidents on week-days, of which there are a fair amount.

Nor is your pitiful claim there is no attention paid to the question any more sound. It is a matter of frequent comment, and certainly of political import in the city. What this weasel's gambit of yours really is, is simply an attempt to dilute the shock aroused by periodic massacre, which you evidently fear might actually change the political and social climate sufficiently to provide some check to the free reign of the NRA over our state and national legislatures.

21. I don't think anyone would argue that gun control...

... created Hitler.

But, there is no doubt that this gun control -- enacted by Hitler 11 November 1938-- cost untold thousands of Jewish lives.

"Jews (§5 of the First Regulations of the German Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935, Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 1333) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority. "

22. The Technical Term For That, Sir, Is Bullshit

If you were to actually take a course in Holocaust studies, and offered that on a test as a major factor enabling the Hitlerite program of exterminations, you would receive a failing grade, and probably be held up to ridicule before the class by the instructor, pour encourager les autres....

It is a claim that is so puerile and ignorant that it is offensive, on a par with financiers complaining an increase in their taxes is tantamount to Hitler invading Poland, or professional moral majority types claiming campaigns against bullying of gay students are the first steps towards herding Christians into gulags. If every adult Jew in Germany had had a rifle the difference it would have made to the outcome is flat zero. People can indulge themselves in romantic, red-blooded fantasies of what they would have done had they been there with a gun, but in common with other masturbatory pursuits, that really ought to be conducted in privacy, and certainly ought not to be taken as a basis for public policy. A pretty sound general rule is that fantasies of personal omnipotent heroism make a poor basis for government policies and social norms.

34. Hmmmm...

shadowrider (4,193 posts)
11. My contention is merely there's an Aurora every single weekend in Chicago, yet there is

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no outrage in LBN or GD.

Nothing more, nothing less.

And now at the criticism:

The attempt to present Chicago as a place under siege by violence is laughable...

Someone needs to inform the many posters who bemoan America's gun violence rate. They might not use your precise language--America is "under siege by violence"--but the idea is the same. And America is, I think you will agree, much less violent than Chicago.

...to attempt to present the cumulative total of incidents among two and three-quarter millions of persons in an area of about two hundred twenty-five square miles over a period of seventy-two hours, with a point of massacre occurring in a space of minutes in an enclosed area of no great size, during which a great portion of the persons present were struck, is simply to display gross contempt for the intelligence of persons you address.

Your own statement is certainly no flattery.

Statements like "more people die of X each year than died in the Vietnam, Korean and 1st Gulf Wars" are not uncommon, nor do I feel insulted by them. Of course the time scales are different and there are many more people in America than there were US combatants in those wars. Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong with the comparison; it attempts to fool no one. Both speaker and audience understand the distinctions and take them into consideration. There is no insult; there is no deception; there is no problem.

What is insulting to me is the assumption that I don't know that such comparisons are common, and that I can be swayed to think that something untoward is taking place. It isn't.

The problem, as I see it, is that you are leading people to despise shadowrider's post without any just rationale. And in doing so, you are asking them to believe that a common statement type is an aberration. The only apparent alternative is that you are similarly offended by all such statements, in which case you would have quite unusual sensibilities.

Nor is your pitiful claim there is no attention paid to the question any more sound. It is a matter of frequent comment, and certainly of political import in the city. What this weasel's gambit of yours really is, is simply an attempt to dilute the shock aroused by periodic massacre, which you evidently fear might actually change the political and social climate sufficiently to provide some check to the free reign of the NRA over our state and national legislatures.

I see what you did there. Let's look back at shadowrider's post, shall we?:

there is no outrage in LBN or GD.

He said "there is no outrage"; you criticized the nonexistent claim that "there is no attention paid." His comments were limited to "LBN or GD"; you talked about the state of things "in the city."

I will assume that these are honest mistakes, but at the very least they are gross distortions that happen to enhance your case. And they are insults to the reader's intelligence, however unintentional they may be. One might even call your claims "pitiful."

28. Correct. I have

14. Well, sir, it is patently obvious that wider ownership of guns wouldn't make things any worse.

And it would allow those who are on the lower socioeconomic rungs of the ladder - i.e. not wealthy, not politically connected, not celebrities - to have available to themselves the means of defending themselves if they chose to do so.

Criminals, and this includes gang members like those in the Gangster Disciples, prefer to attack those they deem as less capable of defending themselves and Chicago has done it's damnedest to make sure that such persons have a target-rich environment.

15. You Do Understand, Sir, Your Comments Do Not Touch Reality At a Single Point....

Gang members generally attack members of rival gangs, and do so by ambush, or at least in circumstances where they have some advantage of surprise. Persons who are not members and become victims of gang shooting generally are simply bystanders, struck by stray rounds or caught in the open when an exchange between armed men breaks out. Both sides, where gangs are hostile, are reasonably well armed, and so the idea the toll flows from a lack of arms in the hands of the people shot is nonesensical. Where surprise is achieved by an assailant, an assailant who intends simply to kill, whether the target is armed or not is pretty much beside the point: the man who simply steps up with gun in hand will prevail, whatever the other might have had in waistband or pocket.

Details of a pair of shootings a while ago in a former neighborhood of mine illustrate the point quite well. In the first, two groups on either side of a street which was a factional boundary exchanged shots, with one member of one group being wounded. Later that night, a van pulled up beside a group of youths congregated on the sidewalk at a usual gathering point for one faction ( the one which had had no casualty in the earlier exchange ); the van's side door was cracked open, one shot, one only, was fired at a range of about five yards, striking one youth in the head, leaving him dead on the scene, upon which the van departed instantly at some speed. The second, fatal shooting, was clearly in retaliation for the first, and the night effected a sudden shift in local boundaries, with the group that had suffered the fatality retreating several blocks. In the first incident, both sides possessed pistols, and the firing was mutual; in the second, it is almost certain some in the group possessed pistols, but had no opportunity to use them against a successful surprise attack. In neither case was a lack of weaponry on the part of the persons shot a factor, nor could it be seriously suggested that possession of arms by the person shot would have prevented the outcome.